All the Dead Yale Men (23 page)

“We'll row together sometime,” I said.

“Anytime,” said Robert.

“You better get ready,” said Pia. “His splits are under 2:00.”

She cried, too, and they went in and sat down, Robert's tall, blondish head above the others.

So I sat in the cool air of the chapel, scented with flowers and the newly dry-cleaned clothes and perfume worn by some of the women. Out the window, the churchyard had gray stones sticking up like boulders cracked by frost, covered with lichen, and beyond the black metal fence of the churchyard the current in the Delaware showed as a slight braid in the otherwise green and dark water, and above it all the sky was smoky, as it always is at this time in the spring. Bare trees, the sudden frost.

About a hundred people showed up, mostly older than me, men and women of my father's generation who came to funerals as a sort of endless dress rehearsal for the one they weren't going to be able to attend, at least not on two feet, and who looked around with a sort of sad accounting to see who, among their friends, had fallen aside. The minister was the chaplain at Yale and he spoke of my father's service in North Africa, his skill as a hockey player at Yale, his instinct for “fun,” which we all knew was a way of admitting that the man we were saying good-bye to had been a drunk. The minister seemed to be keeping his eyes on the otherworld, as though by doing so, he could avoid having to address the pitfalls of this one.

Men in dark tweeds and women in gray and black dresses sat here and there, the men from the school where my father had taught law and diplomacy, although everyone knew this was a
front for his CIA stunts, and the friends and associates from that aspect of my father's work stood around at the sides of the chapel, not wanting to sit down, I guess, because they had been trained not to get comfortable in any place where there was only one exit. They looked a lot like the professors and academic administrators who had shown up, although the CIA ones appeared more like an academic who had just published a book that had gotten a bad review in a journal that was important for scholarly success. Or maybe it was more intense than that: the men looked like they had been sleeping with a graduate student who was about to spill the beans. A constant worry and a sort of dread.

At the back stood two men whom I thought might have been the next generation of spooks, or maybe the CIA had gone democratic, since these men had obviously not gone to Groton or Saint Paul's and Yale, but came from somewhere a long ways down the academic and social river. They wore black suits and one of them had a gold earring about the size of a golf ball. They both had bad skin and wore their hair slicked back, and from time to time they turned to stare out the door or out the window at that array of headstones that seemed to be dying, too, absorbed into the earth, eaten by lichen.

Fifty or so people who cry at the same time is not a comforting sound, but perhaps a necessary one. Pia cried harder than all the rest, so much that I thought she would dissolve, that she would just disappear in the silver streaks that came from her eyes, and when she wiped them away, it seemed that she cried for my father, whom she had liked, for me, and for everything else, too, having been seduced by a punk, having made a fool of herself, and out of relief, I guess, that even here she had a chance to start again. Robert looked straight ahead, although when he touched her hand, she seemed to take comfort and to lean against him.

The men with the slicked hair and the bad skin stood at the back, more like morticians than mourners. One reached for a cigarette and the other gave him an elbow in the ribs.

We filed out. The ashes were in the back of the car, and when I picked them up, I was oddly reassured by the weight of the box, as though that, at least, gave me some momentary connection to my father.

The two men in dark suits with the lousy skin stood right behind me, their backs against the black fence with the small points, like spearheads that went around the churchyard. In the distance, around a hole near the back of the place, the mourners gathered in a sort of disorder.

“Hey, Frank,” said the man with the earring.

“Sorry about your trouble,” said the other one.

“Thank you,” I said.

I held the box in both hands, my eyes set on the churchyard, the gray stone and that ragged circle of people. My feet moved a little in that dusty, brown soil, and as I held the box, felt its weight, smelled the cheap cologne these two were wearing, I said, “You're from Stas, aren't you?”

The air seemed a little heavier, a little more ominous, and the sun, for a moment, seemed filled with ill will, as though while it gave life, it had occasions, too, when it was ready to do its worst.

“Can we talk for a minute, Frank?” said the first one.

“I asked you something,” I said.

“Listen,” said one. “You can call me Semyon. This is Timofei.”

“Sorry for your trouble,” said Timofei.

“Thanks,” I said.

Semyon, his skin rough in that gray light, put his hand on my arm, although he didn't touch the box. At least he had enough sense not to do that.

“Get out of my way,” I said. “I'm busy.”

“We know that, Frank,” said Semyon.

“We understand,” said Timofei. “But you can imagine how important this is if we'd talk to you now.”

“About what?” I said.

“Well, that's complicated,” said Timofei. He put his hand across his chin. The people in the churchyard glanced at us, not impatient, not anything, really, aside from the fact that they seemed to look like people just before a bomb goes off, or before someone yells fire. The men from the CIA glanced at the sky, the river, the hole in the ground.

“We want to remind you of that favor,” said Semyon.

“It was an important one,” said Timofei.

“Aurlon Miller? Remember?” said Semyon. “And so we may ask you for help. That's all. One hand washes the other.”

“That's what we have to say,” said Timofei.

He stood back.

“We'll be in touch,” said Semyon.

“You know, maybe some friends of ours who are having legal trouble in Boston might need some help.”

“Listen to us,” said Timofei. He put his hand on the box, as though he was going to take it from me. I looked at him, in the eyes. He stared back.

“Don't,” I said. “Don't you dare . . . Let go.”

Semyon smiled.

“Go on about your business,” said Timofei. “Pay your respects to the dead. They need it. We'll talk to you some other time.”

“Let go,” I said.

I put the box on the ground and stepped toward Semyon, but he opened his hands, as though blessing me, and then stepped back. Timofei did, too.

“These guys causing trouble?” said Tim Marshall.

“No,” I said.

I made my way through those stones, the box in my hands, in that smoky air with the sun hanging there like a lemon on a gray sheet, the haze so thick it felt we were already in the underworld, where the mists of the dead hung with such infuriating vagueness: here was the atmosphere of eternity, but it wasn't definite enough to get your hooks into. The path between the stones was covered with a little sandy gravel, and my shadow moved along it, a shade over the film of light that came through the gray mist.

The crowd turned toward me. Alexandra stood by the small hole in the ground and stared at me: I felt the caress of her glance, her steadfastness. I came through the gate. It was about thirty yards from the entrance to the churchyard to the hole in the ground, and as I approached it, a car door slammed behind me and then an engine started. The crowd seemed to open up, to pull back, and I carried the box in two hands, and as I went, I wanted to put it down and open it up to look in at the dust and the chips of bone to ask my father just what the hell I should do now.

I stood next to the hole. The box fit in perfectly. The grain of the box looked like the current in the surface of the river, and then I stood up, missing my father more than ever, although I'm sure if he had been here he would have only insisted on more delusion, on denial, on the notion that if we all just had another drink everything would be fine.

We all picked up a handful of dirt, my father's old CIA pals sad and somehow exhausted, as though burying each other had come to the point of being as much part of the job as the work they had done fucking up governments in South America. They came up to the small hole and reached down, their hands shaking, as they picked up the dry dirt and dropped it in, letting it fall through their fingers like the flow of regret itself.

On the other side of the fence the car had been pulled into gear, and the engine faded away as the two men, one with an earring, drove along the river, the sound getting fainter and fainter, like a memory that one wanted to hang on to but that was nevertheless disappearing no matter how hard you tried. The car had burned a little oil and the mist of it, like a black cloud, hung in the air.

Finally, with that dirt on my hands, I went to the back of the crowd and waited for the rest of my father's friends to be done, to stand there with a handful of dirt so as to say good-bye as it slipped through their fingers and onto that sad, lonely box.

Alexandra took my hand with a squeeze and said, “Well, that's the worst of it.” Then she glanced at the car that had driven away. “Is that the trouble?”

The air was smoky blue, that odd fate-tinted color that you usually see in the fall, but which was nevertheless here in the spring. Not like fog, but more like a cataract in a blue eye, at once ominous and blind, and all the more ominous for being that way, as though fate didn't care what it was going to do so long as the bang was loud enough. I often felt this when we hunted deer, or when I had hunted deer with my father, and in that Oo-Bang of a center-fire rifle, and when a deer had been shot through the chest and ran into the woods, it was more keen than I could say, but still there for all that. Once, at that moment, an old friend of my father's had said, looking at the deer like this,
Why, he's heartshot. Dead and still running. Well, he'll find out soon the way things are
.

“Yeah,” I said. “Part of it.”

•
  
•
  
•

In Cambridge, the next day, the usual assortment was out, street musicians in tie-dye shirts and torn blue jeans, the three-card
monte boys, the guys with card tables covered with used paperbacks and fold-up umbrellas made in China, a guy with a portable amplifier plugged into an outlet of a head shop. The coffee I held in a paper cup was so hot I had to move it from one hand to the other. The Raver came through the clutter, his gray cape flowing behind him, somehow regal in its sway and flap, his eyes gray, too, his hair thinning a little, but it was obvious he accepted this as part of things. He nodded to the men with card tables, the musicians, stopped in front of the Burger King and knocked on the window, to say hello. The women, in the uniforms, looked a little sour. Then he turned to me.

He handed over a scrap of paper, a little dirty, as though he had used it to clean a windshield, which he did now and then and if the driver didn't give him some money, he had another sponge filled with oil that he would swipe across. “Ying and Yang,” he called it. The Raver stood next to me and then he said, as he looked at a woman through the window of the Au Bon Pain, “Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good. How's the heart?”

SO
,
A WEEK
after the funeral, the dust, like a gray boa, trailed from Tim Marshall's new Subaru on the dirt road to the gun club. The gun club is where Marshall liked to talk: no one around, the scent of gunpowder, which to him was like the aroma of fertilizer to a farmer. But even with the windows rolled up in the Audi, the grit still got in, and it made a little crunch between my teeth, and it probably got into the gun case, too, where I kept my grandfather's L.C. Smith field-grade shotgun. Marshall had a custom-made trap gun, a pump that had started out as a Remington, but he had the trigger fixed so he could, as he said, just think about it going off, and bam! That's the secret, he said: you think more than shoot.

I stayed in that dust, and we pulled up to the gun club, which was nothing more than a wooden shed on one side, a cement house that held the machine to launch birds, and a dusty parking
lot. Beyond the blockhouse, the landscape sparkled with broken birds and scrub that seemed as though it should grow in the Mojave or the Kalahari, on the edge of death but knowing that patience was its only hope. The Bulgarian who ran the club launched the birds. He usually wore a wife beater and said the blockhouse where the birds were launched reminded him of the apartments he had rented in Bulgaria. “Same smell,” he said. “Wet concrete.”

Marshall wore a pair of khaki pants, a blue work shirt, some boots with steel toes that a longshoreman would wear, as though to show that this was all unofficial. He had on his day-glo vest, with a pocket for shotgun shells, which hung with the weight of them. Just us here today. He took his shotgun out of the car, the port already open, so you could see no round was chambered, and then said, “Frank, we've got some trouble.”'